L'horloge magique ou La petite fille qui voulait être princesse

I have in my hands the latest DVD of Starewitch's work, Les Contes de l'Horloge Magique (The Magic Clock). This is R2 PAL and costs $25.xx US from Chalet Films and took 7 days from ordering to receiving ( cheers to Chalet! ). It is in French with NO subtitles. The main menu consists of the movie (running time 60 minutes), scene selection and extras which consist of three trailers for other films.

Seeing this is a lot like when I first saw The Tale of the Fox on the big screen as it really stunned me that such work was being done in the early days of stop motion technology. With Fox I had seen it shortly after seeing A Nightmare Before Christmas and thinking THAT was the pinnacle of SMA film-making, was stunned to see the revelation that Starewitch had made something of a similarly epic scale 60 years previously and basically by himself. While watching Fox I was in awe of what he was able to do with sets, direction and effects and was continually amazed at his excellent Tex Avery (Warner Bros) style pose to pose character animation.

This new DVD again shows that his animation and direction holds up to a lot of today's standards. In fact there are a lot of effects in The Magic Clock that I have not seen Starewitch use elsewhere and definitely makes this worth seeking out. There are several split and rear screen composites along with some pretty intricate pixilation of the human actors in order to interact with either a fantastical environment or SMA puppets. One interesting group of scenes uses pixilated cutouts of Nina Star in order to be placed within SMA set environments and to be held in the hand of a giant (pixilated) human actor.

Despite Starewitch's technical strength I was mostly impressed by his skill at getting emotion and action out of his characters. Sometimes the animation is almost uncanny in how "human" they act. And again like in most of his more famous works such as The Mascot and The Tale of the Fox he put stop-motion blur to great effect, which really livens up the flow of the pose to pose animation. It isn't really like go-motion since it isn't used all of the time, but it does accentuate quick entrances, exits and prat falls.

Which brings me to the last thing I have to comment on and that is Starewitch's ability to tell a fun and entertaining story. I think anyone who has watched a Starewitch movie knows that he has a very healthy (and sometimes dark) sense of humor which is expertly shown through visual prat falls and sometimes 3 Stooges-esquire stunts. He's able to tie all of this action together in order to tell very cohesive and exciting stories and does so three times over in The Magic Clock.

Speaking of which, the shorts that make up this DVD are La Petite Chanteuse des rues, La Petite Parade and L'Horloge Magique. Each is a stand alone story that happens to involve Nina Star as the protagonist.

This film with such a long and frenchified title, that is to say, "L'Horloge Magique Ou La Petite Fille Qui Voulait Etre Princesse", is another remarkable and astonishing Herr Ladislaw Starewicz stop-motion puppet animated film.This German Count must declare that he loves ( yes, sometimes aristocrats experience something akin to human feelings… ) the Starewicz oeuvre, animated films with a complex and attractive universe in which the most incredible creatures lives and go on amazing adventures too. In these animated films,different insects, rats or even human puppets ( the most dangerous of all… ) keep to their natures,while doing things they normally would not do; a beetle is a beetle but he likes to go on bicycle or to the cinema. This integration of human devices within the insects or reptile world creates a strange mixture that attracts or disgust the audience at the same time.

This time, in "L'Horloge…" Herr Starewicz mixes puppet animation and live action, achieving a beautiful and rapturous film that tells the story of a watchmaker who has made a strange clock that, when it strikes the midnight hour, brings to life a tiny puppet world from inside the clock. The watchmaker's little daughter, Yolande ( Starewicz's daughter Nina Star ), will live together with the puppets, and have strange adventures involving knights and princesses in enchanted forests or mermaids and dragons in a sea world.

The film has the atmosphere of the classic stories, those that we were told when we were children ( incredible perhaps that, even the German aristocrats were innocent babies long ago ) achieving an unreal, strange and attractive world full of those characteristic Starewicz creatures that his technical skill and craftsmanship bring to life. In these witty, wicked or bold puppets lives in a fantastic world that Herr Starewicz endows with poetry and magic, giving the audience the feeling of timelessness and stirring memories of dreams long past.

And now, if you allow me, I must temporarily take my leave due to the fact that this Count must order the disinfecting the "Schloss" from a plague of longhaired beetles.

This rarely seen (if not virtually forgotten) animated fairy tale combines live action with some of the most detailed puppet animation ever created. There's a token storyline about a young girl who dreams of a knight in white armor living in the fantastic clock built by her father; asleep, she is able to enter his enchanted kingdom of castles, dragons, and mischievous faerie spirits. But the astonishing craftsmanship behind all the pixillation is the real draw: each gesture, every facial expression, has been carefully, painstakingly manipulated. The film was also once known (somewhat obviously) as 'The Story of the Little Girl Who Wanted to be a Princess'.